This article was originally published at Shondaland.com
Grab your tissues! The fourth and final season of this provocatively moving comedy is just what we all need.
Sometimes, when a favorite TV show ends, bidding farewell to the characters you’ve become emotionally invested in is bittersweet. Such is the case for me — and no doubt so many others — in saying goodbye to the ineffable assemblage of teens and adults on Sex Education, a brilliant British export airing its fourth and final season on Netflix.
The premise of the show is self-explanatory, but if you’ve never seen it before: Sex Education is centered around the best friendship of Otis (Asa Butterfield), the teenage sex therapy-savant son of single mom and actual sex therapist Dr. Jean Milburn (Gillian Anderson), and Eric (Ncuti Gatwa), the gay son of very religious Christian Nigerian immigrants. As misfits at Moordale Secondary School, Otis and Eric are often humiliated in many slapstick teenage ways yet remain determined to work around the bullies, cool kids, fashion victims, jocks, and nerds to find acceptance with others and themselves to, in Eric’s words, “move up the social chain.” When Maeve (Emma Mackey), the tough-yet-brilliant rebel girl schoolmate Otis crushes on (who is otherwise sleeping with super-jock Jackson), proposes to run a student sex therapy clinic for Otis in an abandoned school annex for money, the trajectory of their relationship — and the relationships of everyone surrounding them —unfurls over four gloriously poignant and seasons.
Because of the masterful pacing and equal distribution of weight between the characters, Sex Education succeeds in presenting a diverse, inclusive reality through an abundance of characters and plotlines that dig deep and normalize the emotional exploration of varied experiences without seeming trite, self-congratulatory, or sententious. The fourth season wraps up with a round of redemption arcs for everyone, with many moving moments of evolution and growth.
As in life, the road to maturity transforms just about everything about these characters — except for maybe Otis’ color-block jacket. The fourth and final season of the show follows the kids to college, and the Cavendish Sixth Form College campus proves to be a complete 180 from the atypical bullying and dysfunction that made the high school experience feel like a brutal boot camp. In a progressive utopia where feelings, personal freedom, and sustainability serve as the guiding principles, at the nexus of the new popular kids are a trans/nonbinary couple, Roman and Abbi, who—in contrast to Moordale’s cool-kid “Untouchables”—are actually nice, accepting, and want to remain positive at all costs.
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Without giving away too much, the popular kids now gravitate toward Eric, who explores the concept of chosen family while facing an existential crisis of faith. Fresh from breaking it off with Ruby (the Moordale mean/popular girl) and reuniting with Maeve, who is in America studying creative writing (look out for Schitt’s Creek’s Dan Levy), Otis struggles with long-distance longing. Viv explores a new relationship, while her best friend, Jackson, the jock-turned-actor, is forced to reckon with his humanity in a new way. We meet O, the college’s resident student sex therapist, which doesn’t sit well with Otis. Adam, Eric’s former bully turned boyfriend, evolves into a sensitive young man and finds a job — and a new friend — that suits him.
Aimee, Maeve’s best friend (and a character MVP delightfully played by Aimee Lou Wood), finds catharsis in coping with her sexual assault with a little help from a new friend. Ruby, the former “Untouchable,” is now decidedly unpopular until she finds her calling. Cal, who has begun their transition, struggles with emotional isolation with the help of Aisha, a close friend of Abbi and Roman. As for the adults, Jean struggles with redirecting her career (featuring hilarious cameos from Hannah Gadsby) after her breakup with Jakob, until her sister Joanna shows up. Adam’s parents — especially his dad — continue on their trajectory of personal growth. Even Maeve’s creative writing teacher (Levy) reckons with his humanity.
With romps aplenty, Sex Education delights viewers of all ages because it isn’t just a hilarious, feel-good show about how youthful horniness drives the inevitable fumble toward a better understanding of who you are and what feels good to you. It’s also about the lifelong process of self-discovery through relationships of all kinds: The adults teaching and raising these teens also get airtime to wrestle with realistic sexual and emotional dilemmas of their own.
On the topic of realism, no one behind the scenes is busier than David Thackeray, Sex Education’s intimacy coordinator, who worked on seasons two through four. Though this final season has fewer of the show’s joyfully explicit sex scenes than previous seasons, Thackeray keeps busy helping the actors — some seasoned, like Gillian Anderson, some newer to acting — look like they’re really getting busy. Even behind the scenes, consent is the name of the game.
“The way my process works is very much about taking the mystery away about how these are shot,” says Thackeray. They use pillows, silicone barriers, and a host of other props, but Thackeray says an open dialogue with the actors is the most important part of planning and directing all the sex scenes: “Giving them [the actors] the tools and the knowledge allows them not to worry about what they’ll be wearing so they can feel empowered when on set. I want them to feel like they can say no to something or ask for a time-out. I want them to feel like their boundaries are heard and respected. The most important thing is that they can feel like they can say no to something.”
Laurie Nunn, who conceived of, writes, and directs the series, told The Guardian back in 2020 (she was unavailable for an interview for this piece due to the WGA strike) that the show was inspired by her own sex education — or lack thereof. “They didn’t talk about female pleasure at all,” she said. “I’m in my 30s, and I feel like I’m only now starting to get the right language to talk about my own body. I think, ‘God, I wish I’d known this stuff when I was in my 20s.’”
As certain states in the U.S. are banning books and eradicating sexual health education to deter critical thinking about sexuality in schools and marginalize LGBTQI youth (like Florida’s current “don’t say gay’’ law that silences children from learning about sex in school), Sex Education is, now more than ever, vital viewing as it offers an honest depiction of what it means to be intimate in relationships of all kinds. “This show has been exploring and celebrating different moments of intimacy from the get-go. It’s not dark and gloomy; it’s also been about joy and love in many forms. It’s exciting, it’s brilliant, and it’s what we need,” says Thackeray. So, as the trailer says, grab your tissues. It’s time to finish this journey together.